often formed such an attachment to their regiment, especially if it had distinguished itself, that they sometimes refused promotion rather than be separated from their children, as they called them.  In them we behold the true model of the French soldier; and it is this kindness, mingled with the austerity of a warrior, this attachment of the chief to the soldier, which the latter is so capable of appreciating, and an impregnable honor, which serve to distinguish our soldiers from all others, and not, as foreigners think, presumption, braggadocio, and libertinage, which latter are ever the characteristics of the parasites of glory alone.

In the camp of Lobau on the evening before the battle of Wagram, the Emperor, as he was walking outside his tent, stopped a moment watching the grenadiers of his guard who were breakfasting.  “Well, my children, what do you think of the wine?”—­“It will not make us tipsy, Sire; there is our cellar,” said a soldier pointing to the Danube.  The Emperor, who had ordered a bottle of good wine to be distributed to each soldier, was surprised to see that they were so abstemious the evening before a battle.  He inquired of the Prince de Neuchatel the cause of this; and upon investigation, it was learned that two storekeepers and an employee in the commissary department had sold forty thousand bottles of the wine which the Emperor had ordered to be distributed, and had replaced it with some of inferior quality.  This wine had been seized by the Imperial Guard in a rich abbey, and was valued at thirty thousand florins.  The culprits were arrested, tried, and condemned to death.

There was in the camp at Lobau a dog which I think all the army knew by the name of corps-de-garde.  He was old, emaciated, and ugly; but his moral qualities caused his exterior defects to be quickly lost sight of.  He was sometimes called the brave dog of the Empire; since he had received a bayonet stroke at Marengo, and had a paw broken by a gun at Austerlitz, being at that time attached to a regiment of dragoons.  He had no master.  He was in the habit of attaching himself to a corps, and continuing faithful so long as they fed him well and did not beat him.  A kick or a blow with the flat of a sword would cause him to desert this regiment, and pass on to another.  He was unusually intelligent; and whatever position of the corps in which he might be the was serving, he did not abandon it, or confound it with any other, and in the thickest of the fight was always near the banner he had chosen; and if in the camp he met a soldier from the regiment he had deserted, he would droop his ears, drop his tail between his legs, and scamper off quickly to rejoin his new brothers in arms.  When his regiment was on the march he circled as a scout all around it, and gave warning by a bark if he found anything unusual, thus on more than one occasion saving his comrades from ambush.